AWS Business Intelligence Blog
AI-powered productivity comes to the West Coast
The Amazon Quick User Group – Los Angeles is a local community of Amazon Quick users in the greater Los Angeles area who come together to share knowledge, best practices, and experiences with the platform. These User Groups typically serve as collaborative forums where members can:
- Learn and share: Exchange inspiration and learnings about Amazon Quick, including how to create custom agents and use unified artificial intelligence (AI) agents for research, business insights, and automation.
- Network: Meet other professionals in the region who are using Amazon Quick for enterprise AI applications, data analytics, and workplace productivity.
- Problem-solve: Discuss challenges, solutions, and new use cases for using Amazon Quick capabilities across different business contexts.
- Stay updated: Learn about new features, updates, and best practices directly from peers and experts.
- Build community: Foster a local support network that complements the broader Amazon Quick ecosystem.
User Groups like this provide peer-to-peer learning opportunities and help you get more value from the Amazon Quick platform. Members build expertise and a collaborative problem-solving network within their geographic community.
In this post, we share highlights from the LA Amazon Quick User Group meetup, held on May 13, 2026, in Santa Monica, California. We had 64 professionals attend the event, and attendees stayed well past the scheduled end time to continue conversations about agentic AI and Amazon Quick.
Agentic AI: The future of work arrives in Los Angeles
For many attendees, this was their first deep dive into agentic AI with Amazon Quick, and many signed up for the free tier during the session. The crowd spanned major sports leagues, global media and entertainment companies, Fortune 500 restaurant groups, leading healthcare systems, Ivy League universities, and technology firms of all sizes. The mix brought together both technical and non-technical perspectives on how AI agents are changing daily work, and conversations continued well past the official agenda.
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Left: Attendees network during the extended break. Right: Participants collaborate during the hands-on Amazon Quick Flows workshop, building automated workflows from natural language prompts.
A community learning together
The User Group leadership team designed a focused agenda based on post-event survey feedback from prior meetups. Attendees consistently requested hands-on experience, product demonstrations, and collaborative discussion time. The agenda delivered on all of these with presentations, hands-on experience, a customer story, and opportunities to exchange ideas.
The evolution of intelligence — setting the stage
Salim Khan, Specialist Solutions Architect for Amazon Quick at AWS, opened the event with a broad overview of AI history. He started with Alan Turing’s ‘Can machines think?’ and moved through rule-based AI, machine learning (ML), deep learning, transformers, and autonomous agents. Salim framed AI as the next major form of human use. Earlier breakthroughs gave humans physical, mechanical, informational, or connectivity use, and AI now provides cognitive use.
The key takeaway was that AI is no longer only a tool for answering questions. It is becoming a platform for completing tasks, coordinating workflows, and extending human decision-making. The discussion touched on ethical questions around autonomous systems and responsibility, with Salim emphasizing that humans still need to set goals, define guardrails, and review outcomes. This theme resonated throughout the day.
The evolution of artificial intelligence: key milestones from the Turing Test (1950) to AI agents going mainstream (2024), showing how the pace of breakthroughs has accelerated from decades to years.
“The Story Continues” — Salim Khan’s closing slide, framing the shift from ‘Can machines think?’ to ‘What will we build with thinking machines?’ and emphasizing a collaborative Human + AI future.
Real-world agentic AI impact: What’s new with Amazon Quick
Ramón Lopez, Principal Solutions Architect for Amazon Quick, presented how Amazon Quick helps business users make better decisions faster and act on them. The platform unifies AI agents for research, business insights, and automation into a single experience while maintaining security and user access policies. The session walked attendees through several major launches:
- Amazon Quick Apps lets users build custom business applications directly through chat without writing code.
- Artifact and file generation creates presentations, documents, and spreadsheets from chat, with Microsoft 365 extensions that work inside Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
- Dashboard generation from natural language lets users describe what they need, and Quick creates an analysis plan, visuals, filters, and calculated fields automatically.
A major focus was the agentic analytics experience powered by Dataset Q&A and Dataset Enrichment. With Dataset Q&A, any user can ask natural language questions directly against structured enterprise datasets. Quick’s text-to-SQL agent generates precise, engine-aware SQL across millions of rows with no sampling, returning answers in seconds across Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and Apache Iceberg tables. The Explain capability lets users inspect the underlying logic and validate results before acting. Dataset Enrichment is the paired feature that lets authors teach the AI their business definitions. Authors provide dataset descriptions, custom instructions, and metadata file uploads from tools like AWS Glue Data Catalog or Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio. This feeds a knowledge graph that powers accurate multi-dataset queries.
The session also demonstrated Amazon Quick Desktop, a native Mac and Windows app that works with local files, calendars, email, messaging tools, and enterprise data. New pricing tiers make Quick accessible to everyone, and individuals can sign up at no cost with no AWS account or credit card required.
Attendees participate in the hands-on Amazon Quick Flows workshop, building automated workflows from natural language prompts in a packed classroom.
Hands-on workshop: Amazon Quick Flows
Arun Maniyan, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, led an interactive workshop on Amazon Quick Flows. Flows is a workflow automation capability and the most requested topic from post-event surveys across all user groups. Attendees built flows from natural language prompts, using a stock ticker example where Quick gathers market data, analyzes financial metrics, reviews news, and produces an investment-style analysis. Arun explained how Flows orchestrate multi-step work by combining web search, research, agents, and general knowledge.
Customer success: NFL IQ — AI meets America’s game
Keegan Abdoo, Senior Manager Research & Analytics at the NFL, shared the journey of building NFL IQ, a fan-facing offseason intelligence platform powered by Amazon Quick. The NFL serves 400 million+ fans globally and needed a way to bring fans inside the front office experience. NFL IQ was built using native Amazon Quick capabilities: a Chat Agent for natural language fan queries, embedded dashboards for combine metrics and draft analytics, and custom integration on NFL.com.
A key takeaway was speed. The team launched in weeks rather than months:
“With Amazon Quick, we were able to go from concept to a live fan experience on NFL.com in about six weeks. The platform gave us the speed to iterate rapidly — building dashboards, an AI chat agent, and embedded analytics without a traditional development cycle. NFL IQ is now how we bring fans inside the front office during the offseason, and we’re excited to keep expanding what’s possible.”
— Keegan Abdoo, Senior Manager Research & Analytics, NFL
Since launching in March 2026, NFL IQ has driven 744K+ total events, engaged 168K+ unique fans, and powered 82K+ chat sessions. This is the first externally-facing Amazon Quick Chat experience on a major consumer property.
Keegan Abdoo, Senior Manager Research & Analytics at the NFL, shares how the team built NFL IQ using Amazon Quick and launched in weeks rather than months.
The numbers speak for themselves
We had 64 checked in (59 attendees + 5 leadership), with 48% beginners, 39% intermediate, and 3% advanced users. Industries represented included Cloud & Technology, Media & Entertainment, Healthcare, Sports Analytics, Food & Restaurants, Education, and more, including 29 named external attendees from organizations outside Amazon and AWS.
“I had a wonderful time attending. Really insightful session, great energy… Loved hearing about the NFL’s advanced analytics use cases. Super fascinating.”
— Tobey Reichman, Program Manager, Amazon
Community partnership excellence
Our success is powered by the LA leadership team: Adaline Bray (Veeps / Live Nation), Arun Maniyan (AWS), Joyce Kim (Amazon), and Partha Siva (Rackspace Technology). Thanks also to the AWS launch and scale team: Kristin Mandia, Mona Saul, Ismael Murillo, Madison Hsieh, and Katie Gray. Special thanks to Jose Kunnackal, Jesse Gebhardt, and the go-to-market and Solutions Architect teams.
Members of the LA Amazon Quick User Group leadership team at the May 2026 meetup.
Expanding our global impact
We now have 10 community-led Amazon Quick User Groups across the Americas (AMER) and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Groups meet in-person in NYC, London, the DACH region, Boston, Austin, LA, Chicago, Phoenix, and Houston, with teams forming in DC and Seattle. In May alone, groups met in Austin (100+), Boston (90+), LA, and Phoenix. We are looking for people to join leadership teams, whether you are an agentic AI expert, a Quick specialist, or bring skills in event planning or marketing.
Get involved
Join our LA Quick LinkedIn Group for updates, including our Wednesday, September 16, 2026 meetup. Register here. Not in LA? Find a user group in your city.
Interested in leading or starting a group in your city? Visit the Amazon Quick community and fill out the leadership interest form.
Looking to connect virtually? You can still learn with others on the Amazon Quick Community. This is your hub for 500+ learning resources, events, networking, and new ways to use the platform’s capabilities. Meet fellow users, share your experiences, and stay current with AI-powered workplace innovation.